I love sugar. I really really love sugar. I generally think of dinner as something I have to endure to get to dessert. In March of this year I stared a monthly cookie/dessert exchange where my friends and I get together under the pretext of exchanging cookies/desserts and their recipes but it’s actually just an excuse to sit around with my friends, talk, laugh, and eat a lot of sugar.

After a particularly good Cookie Exchange I updated my Facebook status with “Jessie is loving the sugar high from Cookie Exchange this afternoon.” A couple of my friends commented on my status informing me that there is no such thing as a “sugar high”.

This seemed crazy to me, I thought it was common knowledge that eating a lot of sugar gives you a buzzed feeling and makes you hyper. Kids go crazy and run around like Tasmanian devils at birthday parties and holidays because of all the sugar, right? Wrong.

It turns out my smarty-pants friends were right, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association’s 1995 meta analysis, sugar does not cause hyperactivity.

JAMA’s Meta analysis looked at 23 studies where children were given food or drinks containing a known quantity of sugar or artificial sweetener (placebo) and their behavior was observed and tested afterward. The tests were double blinded, meaning that neither the children, parents nor the researchers knew which children were getting the sugar and which were getting the placebo. 

The conclusion was: 

       “The meta-analytic synthesis of the studies to date found that sugar does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children. The strong belief of parents may be due to expectancy and common association. However, a small effect of sugar or effects on subsets of children cannot be ruled out.”

Although they stop short of saying that sugar has absolutely no effect on children’s behavior, the evidence was very compelling that sugar does not affect the behavior of an average healthy child. 

Even confronted with this evidence it can be difficult to believe. I’ve heard people grudgingly accept that it may not cause hyperactivity in children but insist that it causes rapid spikes and falls in blood sugar levels which create the feeling of the “Sugar Rush” and the “Sugar Crash”.  

The fact of the matter is, if you are healthy, not diabetic and do not have impaired glucose tolerance, your body does a very good job of producing insulin and regulating your blood sugar levels. 

When your kid eats half of his Halloween candy before you can stop him, his body takes care of it by producing a bunch of insulin that keeps his blood sugar in the normal range.  Diabetics don’t produce enough insulin to regulate their blood sugar and can experience high levels of blood sugar and their symptoms are frequent urination, thirst, hunger, weight loss, fatigue, irritability and blurry vision. This is NOT how people describe a “sugar high” in themselves or in their children. 

“But when I’m hungry and I eat a sugary snack in the afternoon I feel a sugar rush.”

Most likely what you feel is your body responding to having fuel, any fuel. You were hungry and now your body has something to burn. Sugar and simple carbohydrates are absorbed into your body quickly so you may feel the effect of having fuel sooner then if you ate protein. 

The “Sugar Crash” is attributed to a sharp drop in blood sugar or low blood sugar with is called Hypoglycemia. According to Harriet Hall (the totally awesome and generous SkepDoc):

      ”Hypoglycemia was a popular “pseudo disease” a few decades ago: all sorts of vague symptoms were attributed to low blood sugar or rapid drops in blood sugar, and patients were advised to avoid sugar and eat protein. When they actually tested blood sugar levels, this idea didn’t hold up. Real hypoglycemia does occur – in diabetics and people with certain other diseases.”

WebMD describes MILD symptoms of hypoglycemia as nausea, extreme hunger, feeling nervous or jittery, cold, clammy, wet skin and or excessive sweating, a rapid heartbeat, numbness in the fingertips and lips and trembling.  Again, not how people describe a sugar crash. 

So why do so many people, myself included—until recently—talk about a “sugar high” as if it is a fact and why do so many parents insist that sugar makes their kids hyper?

1) In my opinion, it doesn’t seem crazy to assume that something you ingest could affect the way you feel or behave. When I take aspirin, my headache goes away, when I drink alcohol, I tell everyone how awesome they are and act like a moron. 

2) Children can be sensitive to caffeine and may be reacting to the small amounts of caffeine that are found in chocolate and soda.  

3) Kids often get lots of sugar at a special event like Halloween, Christmas, or a birthday party. Special events are exciting and fun and can make kids hyper. If I was at a birthday party where I got to run around with 20 of my friends, hit a piñata, and jump in a bounce house, I would act hyper, too! 

4) The big one and the hardest to swallow is parental expectation. We see what we expect to see. There was a study done at The Menningar Clinic and published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology that showed how strong expectations can affect the parent’s perception of their child’s behavior.  

In this study all mothers identified their children as “sugar sensitive”. All the children were given a placebo (aspartame) but half of the mothers were told that their child was given a large amount of sugar. The mothers who thought their child was given sugar tended to stay physically closer to their child, criticized, looked at and talked to their children more then the parents who knew their children had the placebo. The mothers who thought their children ate sugar also rated their children as significantly more hyperactive the control group.  

5) Children respond to subtle and not so subtle cues parents give them. If they hear parents talking about how all kids go wild every time they eat cake, they think they’re supposed to go wild after eating cake. 

Even though I feel a little silly for falling for the myth of the sugar high, I still love sugar! I’m not advocating eating lots of sugar all the time or saying that eating sugar is healthy,  but I’m glad to know that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity or any spikes in blood sugar that my body can’t handle. It’s just one fewer thing to worry and feel guilty about. So at my next Cookie Exchange I will enjoy my sugar a little more knowing that I feel “high” because I love eating baked goods and talking with my friends not because all the sugar is doing something weird to my body.